Talk about an ideal pairing: classic cars and beer from some of Colorado’s best breweries. Making the match even better is the fact that tonight’s Hops for Hopes at the Lemay Auto Museum (11100 West Eighth Avenue in Lakewood) benefits the SCI Recovery Project, which provides exercise-based recovery programs for…
Does reading this blog make you hunger to write? Westword is expanding its Cafe Society coverage, and we’re looking for a great freelance writer with a passion for food and restaurants, as well as the ability to produce stylish and knowledgeable news and opinion pieces about the Denver dining scene…
If the panhandlers trying to shake me down last night as I left this restaurant on the edge of downtown had been smart, they would have grabbed my leftovers rather than asked for change. But maybe they know I would have fought to the death for the last bits of…
Celebrate the town’s best dives at 8 p.m. tonight, when Club 404, the joint at 404 Broadway that Jerry Feld has owned for more than fifty years, hosts the launch party for Drew Bixby’s Denver’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the Mile High City. Bixby will be on…
See more of Mark Manger’s photos from Cheeky Monk, the subject of this week’s restaurant review, at westword.com/slideshow…
Robb Walsh, restaurant critic for our sister paper, the Houston Press, book author and genial man-about-town, has followed what has now become a well-trod path among the rapidly decreasing ranks of full-time restaurant critics: He has blown his own cover and chosen to face the world as a non-anonymous critic…
Okay, so yesterday I used my not insignificant Staffing Up mojo to give some suggestions as to what ought to be done with the former Mojitos , which closed last week at 1120 East Sixth Avenue. And then this morning, guess what happened? I get a phone call from Alex…
This letter, which was published in today’s issue, could be the best letter Westword has ever received about a review: Having suffered through Jason Sheehan’s unconscionably vindictive review of Mark & Isabella, I will make a point to try the place, simply to protest Sheehan’s (as always) self-indulgent hatchet job…
Just in case you haven’t heard, there’s a new steak house in town — and it comes with a side of strip … tease. Cliff Young, one of Denver’s best-known restaurateurs, recently returned from a 12-year extended holiday in France at the Chateau Cote d’Or to open C Y Steak,…
One potato, two potato, three potato … That’s it for clues. You, too, can be a potato head if you can guess where I’m eating…
This is part two of Lori Midson’s interview with Mary Nguyen, exec chef of Parallel 17. You can read part one of Midson’s interview with Nguyen here. Most embarrassing moment in the kitchen: Before I started cooking, I worked in finance. When I was just starting out in this industry,…
“It’s cool. I mean, not right now. But when the time is right, the view is amazing.” I was standing out in the back parking lot — the smoking lounge of the Nob Hill Inn, the classic dive at 420 East Colfax Avenue that Westword writers staked out for a…
Have you ever had a meal where the food and the atmosphere meld so perfectly that you experience culinary epiphany? That’s what tonight’s Local Color, Local Flavor event at Bacaro, 921 Pearl Street in Boulder, is aiming for. Bacaro’s new chef, Fabio Flagiello, has created a four-course menu to complement…
The first time I saw the Cheeky Monk, I thought to myself, “Well, that’s going to last about five minutes.” An upscale Belgian beer cafe on one of the weirdest, wildest stretches of Colfax? It would be a nice idea somewhere else — like, say, Portland or Antwerp. But as…
I moved to Denver in 2005, so I never had the privilege of knowing the original Skylark Lounge — the one that lived for sixty years at 58 Broadway, where Barry’s on Broadway currently does its damnedest to live up to a legend — but I’ve always understood that no…
Years ago, I stumbled on the Royal Hilltop, a faux-British pub in the middle of a suburban strip mall that, despite its geographical and cultural challenges, was a fine neighborhood bar for those truly in love with greasy fish fries, hand-pulled Fullers, pints of black and creamy Murphy’s stout, and…
The doors of the Nob Hill Inn open at 8 a.m., “so you start off fresh,” says John Plessinger, whose father bought the bar at 420 East Colfax Avenue in 1969 and put it in his then-21-year-old son’s name. Forty years later, by 8 a.m. the owner’s already been at…
Braised Oxtails and Sugo with Homemade Pappardelle Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market’s choicest ingredients home with them, and…
Last week I spent some time at the Nob Hill Inn, a great dive at 420 East Colfax Avenue, chatting with the regulars — some of whom have irregular hobbies. Doctor Ray takes care of the homeless in the neighborhood. Outreach, he told me. Getting them into shelters for the…
Buchi Cafe Cubano is a great Cuban restaurant. Step inside Cuba Cuba on a good night, and you need an oxygen tank (or a powerful constitution) because the air in the bar is like breathing muddled mint and rum. But while Denver has some Cuban restaurants, what this city does…
Having trouble finding your favorite seasonal brew? The Colorado Brewers Guild is working on that. And on Tuesday evening, the Guild — a trade group representing the majority of the 110-plus craft beer-makers in the state — hosted liquor store and restaurant reps at its second annual holiday open house…
XO Noodle Bar, the hip (but hardly happening) noodle bar that opened in June at 1612 Wazee Street in the Jet Hotel, shuttered on Saturday. “We totally believe in the concept,” insists exec chef Jose Guerreco. But, he adds, “it was a huge struggle to get people in that back…
